I would be willing to pay up to $400, but a product like this really should be priced under $200. This will never amount to more than a niche market with these ridiculous prices.

If we had quad tuner cablecard cards available in the $200 range with full featured extenders available in the $100-150 price range, I would be singing Media Center's praises from the roof. With the high cost of entry AND the hassle getting everything setup only diehards are going to be interested...

Ben, you really need to look into Intel Speedstep or AMD Cool'N'Quiet (if your cpu supports it) for your media center. Not only is that sucking alot of power having your media center suck that much juice 24x7, but that is also dumping alot of heat into your house!

I went with a very power efficient 45 watt CPU when I rebuilt my media center machine (as well as on my Windows Home Server), turned on Cool'N'Quiet and it just sips power on idle or light duty (which is more than 99% of the day).

I was running Vista media center for a time, but due to a handful of problems I was having I disconnected it until I have the cash for a better solution or until MS fixes some serious flaws with their product line.

A media center PC alone can be problematic to get working. Getting the PC to go into and out of standbye, switch inputs on your receiver etc and always work properly is hard to attain. Unfortunately the extender market has never matured like I had hoped it would. If they had a quieter, low powered xbox 360 to use as an always on extender it wouldn't be a big deal.

My biggest gripe is that Windows Home Server & Media Center should be one product. SaveTV sells a Windows Home Server plugin to run their media server software on WHS, but somehow Microsoft cannot manage this impossible feat? This is the solution that I am currently leaning toward.

It is a real shame, because there are so many great things about media center that I would love to take advantage of. I just cannot justify running an always on media center box in addition to my always on Windows Home Server and then buying over priced, under powered and featured extender devices when I can go with a combo deal from SageTV for much cheaper and run it all on my WHS box. Before I pull the trigger I am going to wait for final details on the next version of WHS.

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Better codec support and a simple appliance than can be left on all the time without sucking alot of power and pumping out a lot of noise and heat.

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Steven, I don't blame you one bit for ripping disks instead of downloading. It isn't just about the quality difference of the lossless compression for me. If I ever want to reencode my music I am not making a lossy copy of a lossy copy. I can take the original lossless version and reencode as many times as I want without concern that I am degrading the quality to a noticeable level.

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Who cares what the hardware looks like, I want to see some pics of the UI!

The nonstandard layout of the insert, delete, home, end, page up and page down keys makes the keyboard worthless for anybody that actually knows how to type. A shame these keyboard manufacturers feel the need to try and buck convention when typing is so much about muscle memory...